iSmashPhone

Today's Notable iPhone Apps - Monday July 13th Edition

Today's iPhone app reviews are all about enhancing your activities. With TuneWiki, you'll never be bored while listening to music. With Worms, the classic game that's been on virtually every platform, you'll keep yourself entertained when you need to kill some time. With MotionX GPS (updated version) you'll be ready for running, hiking, and enjoying the outdoors. And with PhotoBeamer (and it's companion BeamCatcher) you'll be able to share your photos at parties without passing your phone over into another person's hands. 

Journey From Cydia to App Store: TuneWiki Went Legit

As of today, TuneWiki is a legit iPhone app that's available in the App Store. You can check out our tunewiki review from the days when it was available only on Cydia.  

Besides being available in the App Store, not much has changed. TuneWiki is a must have app for any music lover.

(From our previous review...)

Features:

- easy to use navigation buttons

- album art support for your music collection

- live song lyrics - sing along with your favorite tunes, and contribute back to the project with lyrics for your songs if they are not in the database.

- music maps - see what songs are playing near your location or in a specific region (like the United Kingdom)

- Tune Wiki Top 50 - see what other Tune Wiki users are playing

- help menu - shows you how to use the tunewiki interface

- very good reliability - never crashed during my tests

Limitations:

- it needs an internet connection, either WiFi or EDGE/3G because all the information displayed is stored on Tune Wiki's servers.

- can be sluggish in low performance network conditions

We are glad that Apple's new iPhone 3.0 allows access to the music library, which encourages developers to migrate their jailbroken-only apps to legitimate ones.

Strangely, TuneWiki is still available on Cydia, which is (we're pretty sure) against Apple's agreements.

Try Tune Wiki for free at the App Store.

TwittaRound for iPhone asks: What Are You Doing? And Where Are You Doing It?

In case you've gone through life so far while being blissfully unaware of the phrase "reality augmentation" -- well, today's your lucky day.  Or something.

Michael Zoellner's TwittaRound (currently in beta testing) enhances the iPhone 3GS Twitter experience by utilizing the phone's compass and accelerometer GPS to show you nearby Tweeters.  The video above tells you more about the app.

What it doesn't you is that apps like these use non-public API's to perform their video tricks -- so don't expect to see this in the App Store anytime soon.

[Via Gizmodo]

Take The Phone To The Train

And the "augmented reality" apps just keep coming...

In addition to TwittaRound (see elsewhere in this fine bloggeroo), now comes an iPhone 3GS app to help you locate the nearest subway station.  However, since the app is called "Nearest Tube," it's rate of success kinda depends on how close you are to London town. 

Like TwittaRound, Nearest Tube uses the 3GS's video camera and GPS, adding its own directional apps to point you to the nearest station for the Underground's various train lines.  Unlike TwittaRound, though, Nearest Tube creators Across Air apparently got House of Jobs approval, and their pride and joy will be featured in the App Store "veddy shortly, old bean" -- by their estimates, one of the first aug-reality apps to hold that distinction.